Teardown Time for Big Builder Magazine

With no meaningful housing recovery expected anytime soon, publisher Hanley Wood decided the November/December issue will be the last, ending a wild ride for a magazine that chronicled the housing frenzy and the worst downturn in generations.

The publication was launched in 1997 as an offshoot of Builder magazine. Big Builder was freely distributed to qualified industry movers-and-shakers interested in ground-level topics such as the rent-vs.-buy market and “the pros and cons of whether to centralize or decentralize sourcing operations.”

Those subjects helped sales of advertisements soar during the boom, when the nation’s home builders were slapping up homes just as quickly as they could. But plenty of those homes ended up in foreclosure, helping depress housing values and fuel the financial crisis.

The resulting anemic demand has forced builders to build fewer houses. Sales of new homes, which peaked 1.3 million in 2005, are on track this year to dip about 300,000, the lowest number since the Census began keeping records in 1963.

“A 300,000 new-home sales market … is simply not business enough for all of us,” Big Builder Editorial Director John McManus writes in a blog post. (He’ll remain with the company. Two staffers will be cut.) The parent publication, Builder, will not be affected.

The housing crash has been particularly brutal on large national home builders that are frantically cutting costs and reexamining their build-everything-in-every-market strategies to turn a profit and satisfy shareholders. Shares of Hovnanian Enterprises and Beazer Homes USA are trading below $2.

Given such dire circumstances, they may not consider advertising in Big Builder a justified expense. Same for suppliers– window and door manufacturers have also seen sales plunge. That, along with advertisers preferring online ads, has depressed the magazine’s advertising by nearly 75%. It previously scaled back its every-other-week publishing ambitions in favor of every other month. Now comes the end.

“We’re all disappointed with where the market has taken it,” Warren Nesbitt, a Hanley Wood group president, tells Developments.

Still, should housing recover, the print pub could be, well, rebuilt. “We’re ready to bring it back,” he said. “I hope it’s soon but you just don’t know.”